Health care reform puts Dots on the spot

Many companies have big decisions to make about their health benefits in the wake of health care reform. The Wall Street Journaltakes a close look at how that will play out for various employers, including Dots LLC, the women's clothing chain based in Glenwillow.Dots “projects that its health costs could go up by around a third because of the law,” The Journal reports. “That is largely because only about 55% of the employees who are currently eligible for health benefits take the coverage, and the retailer thinks that share could jump sharply.”Joanna Curran, benefits and payroll manager at Dots, tells The Journal that the company has been preparing for that increase for two years, trimming its costs with moves such as boosting workers' premium contributions and putting new employees into a more basic health plan.“In coming months, Dots' top executives will have to decide what else to do. One possibility: more cost-sharing for employees,” the newspaper adds. “Dots also will consider more strictly enforcing existing limits on the hours of a small group of part-timers who occasionally go over 30 a week today, to avoid the complexity of having workers bounce back and forth into the law's definition of full-time status.”Ms. Curran notes, “We are facing the fact that we are going to have to spend more money." But Dots won't drop its coverage because it would hurt recruitment and retention of employees, she says.

This and that

Savvy about money: Forbes.com offers some tips for cutting college expenses, and one section of the piece involves a sharp young man who attended Cuyahoga Community College.Robert Villwock, 27, “found a way to knock $42,000” off the cost of his degree in business and economics by spending the first four semesters of his college career at Tri-C, Forbes.com notes. He then transferred to Ohio University in Athens to finish his school work.“The transfer scheme works only in some states and only for students who get good enough grades to be admitted to the brand-name university,” according to the website.Then this part is fun:A year after graduating, Villwock was a bartender at a Ruby Tuesday. A customer ordering a cheesecake lamented what cholesterol would do to his life span and said, “But in the long run we're all dead.” Villwock piped in: “John Maynard Keynes couldn't have said it better.” The customer, curious how a bartender would know who Keynes was, found out enough to offer the young man a job at his financial consulting firm in Akron.Villwock leveraged the consulting experience, and some networking with Ohio U. alumni, into a still better job. He's now a compensation specialist at Towers Watson in Washington, D.C.Good thinking: The Cleveland Indians have done a deal with a Cincinnati company — but it's not the Reds.A company called ThinkVine, a maker of marketing software, has added the Indians as a customer.

“The firm's specialized software for baseball will help the club, part of Major League Baseball's American League, to adjust its marketing based on league standings or other factors,” Mark Battaglia, CEO of ThinkVine, tells The Business Courier of Cincinnati.Deal terms were not disclosed.Collusion?: A Spokane, Wash.-based company is suing several professional sports teams — including the Indians — for breach of contract.The Spokesman-Review in Washington state reports that Vizant Technologies LLC, formerly known as P.E. Systems, recently filed lawsuits in Spokane County Superior Court against the Indians, the Detroit Lions, the Chicago White Sox and others. Vizant advises businesses on how to lower the cost of accepting electronic payments.“Under the company's standard agreement, the client must pay a consulting fee of 50 percent of all savings if it decides to implement Vizant's program,” according to the newspaper. “If the client chooses not to implement the program but still realizes some program savings, the client is obligated to pay the same consulting fee on the savings for 24 months.”Nicholas D. Kovarik, of Spokane-based Piskel Yahne Kovarik PLLC, which is representing Vizant, tells the Spokesman-Review that the companies all stopped paying in the same time frame and may be working together.“We think there's some conversation going on behind the scenes,” he said of the sports teams. “The theme that's running through these is the bigger companies don't believe they need to pay, or if they don't pay, they're going to get a discount or a break. It's just a classic not following through with your promise.”Sad but true: There's a spot-on comment from Cleveland City Councilman Mike Polensek in this Reuters story about homicide rates in various U.S. cities.In some cities, including New York, murder rates are dropping fast, while Chicago and Detroit are seeing big spikes.Cleveland, unfortunately, is among the latter. The city had 97 murders in 2012, up from 74 in 2011 and 84 in 2010. With a population of 393,816, that works out to 1 murder for every 4,060 people, Reuters notes."I attribute it to young men with low IQs carrying big guns,” Mr. Polensek tells the news service. “It is just the reality of it.”In four more years … Here's more evidence that Ohioans will continue to be barraged by political ads during presidential election seasons.

Bloomberg crunches some numbers from the 2012 election and finds that in just four states — Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia — was the winning candidate's margin of victory less than 5 percentage points. That was the smallest number of states below that threshold since 1984, when three states were within 5 points amid Ronald Reagan's 18-point victory in the popular vote over Democrat Walter Mondale, according to Bloomberg.The story notes that President Barack Obama is the first president to achieve 51% of the popular vote in two elections since Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, who did it in 1952 and 1956. Read all about it: The e-reader era just arrived, but now it might be ending, and people like Julie Curtis of Stow might be to blame.That sounds much too harsh. Let me explain.The Wall Street Journal reports that market researcher IDC recently estimated 2012 global shipments of e-readers — Kindles and Nooks, primarily — at 19.9 million units, down 28% from 27.7 million units in 2011. By contrast, IDC says, there were 122.3 million tablets — iPads, Kindle Fires, Nexus 7s, etc. — shipped last year.In short, many people who want to read e-books rather would do so reading on tablets than dedicated e-readers.Also, “One problem is that some users who bought e-readers see no particular urgency to buy another,” The Journal reports. Ms. Curtis, a substance-abuse counselor, tells the newspaper she is devoted to her two-year-old Kindle."It works fine, I really have no reason to get a new one," she says. But she adds, "If I did ever want to upgrade, it would probably be to a tablet, like the Kindle Fire.”True stories: If you're a fan of graphic novels, this best-of-2012 list compiled by The AV Club includes a couple nonfiction choices with Northeast Ohio ties.The first one is indeed graphic: It's cartoonist John “Derf” Backderf's “My Friend Dahmer,” a memoir about growing up as a classmate in the Akron area of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. The book “describes how Derf and his buddies became 'fans' of Dahmer's quirky behavior, though none of them knew what Dahmer was up to when he returned to his broken home,” The AV Club says. “Derf chillingly illustrates the superficiality of most high-school relationships, where the people involved are so absorbed in their own lives that they fail to see the desperate characters who dwell among them.”At No. 4 on the nonfiction list is “Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me,” by the late Harvey Pekar and JT Waldman. It's “structured like a long conversation taking place over the course of one day in Cleveland, in which the two men explore the origins and consequences of Zionism,” according to The AV Club.You also can follow me on Twitter for more news about business and Northeast Ohio.

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